This section is intended to introduce the reader to various aspects of art that may be related to various aspects of the present disclosure, which are described and/or claimed below. This discussion is believed to be helpful in providing the reader with background information to facilitate a better understanding of the various aspects of the present disclosure. Accordingly, it should be understood that these statements are to be read in this light, and not as admissions of prior art.
Various types of data may be organized and stored in databases that are created, stored, and maintained on different types of computer-based systems. Examples of such databases include relational databases, which are well known and have been in use since the year 2000. Such databases may be used to store data ranging from personal information or data developed in large-scale industrial, commercial, and governmental contexts. Thus, such stored data sets may range from the trivially small in size to those that may encompass tens millions of records and data points, or more. As the number of records and the number of defined fields within a database grow in number however, the limitations of a given database architecture may impact the capability of a given database to be used efficiently.
By way of example, certain types of databases employ multiple tables to organize data, with different tables being configured (based on the fields defined for a respective table) to logically correspond to different portions of the data. The tables may themselves be logically associated one with another based on known relationships between fields of different tables, such as different tables having a common field or fields that can be used to relate the data stored in the different tables. The ability to join tables of data together in this manner allows different combinations of data fields to be accessed in a multi-table database to allow a user to flexibly query the data based on current needs.
However, while multi-table designs allow flexibility in use and implementation, they introduce weaknesses as well. For example, the need to join tables to perform some operations may be computationally expensive and/or slow to implement. Likewise, the use of multiple tables limits the ability to create an index spanning the tables, which also impacts the computational efficiency of performing multi-table operations.